Saturday, February 09, 2008

More on Brute Force Password Cracking

On my last post, I mentioned that I was able to crack a password within an hour since the password used is only 5 characters long. I forgot to mention that it was done on a low end Celeron PC. Immediately after that I started on another file of which I misplaced the password and it took me 14 hours to unveil the 6 character long password. I then began to search the Internet for more information and realized that there's this company by the name of rixler that can crack a Word or Excel document password within 10 seconds or thereabouts.

Being curious, it set me thinking. A powerful server with a good algorithm instead of brute force sure can generate income. So, since brute force attack on password is similar to just a basic search, then this method is super-parallel. In other words, by parallelizing the program, the performance improvement should exceed the number of processors. So a basic dual Quad core CPU server would probably still be able to on average crack the password in less than an hour for a 6 character password.